Re: GG's orthodox interpretations

[Michael Arnowitt <arnowitt@sover.net>]

Bradley wrote:
>In Partita 5 (both the CBC and CBS recordings) and somewhat also in 6, GG
>still uses those "party tricks" of hairpin dynamics, subtle rhythmic
>nuance, and tempo flexibility that he later deliberately eradicated from
>his Bach playing.  I wish he'd kept those throughout his career rather
>than wiping them out, because to me they're the best evidence of his
>instinctive musicality.  Yes, he used them to project the music to an
>audience.  They're convincing!  And why is projecting to an audience
>"wrong"?  Isn't that a main point of musical performance? ... 

My immediate reaction to these last two sentences was "but what if your goal
is to transcend," and then I was glad to see Allan repost an e-mail that
dealt in part with transcendence (quoted below).  Sometimes the greatest
experiences possible to performer and listener are when you go beyond A
communicating to B, but rather the performer leads the listener, opening a
door if you will, into some place which transcends our everyday experience.
Then A (the performer) and B (the listener) merge.  This is where art has
goals larger than entertainment.

I've experienced this both as a performing pianist and (more frequently) as
a listener.  It strikes me that many decisions Gould made in his personal
life, starting with his retirement from the concert stage, were oriented
toward isolating himself from the normal, mundane current of everyday
events, possibly with the hope of increasing the chance for moments of
transcendence.

I think Gould's comment about hairpins and other party tricks that
performers do being objectionable had to do with them being *consciously*
utilized to impress an audience, or to help artificially project in a large
concert hall.  He had no problem with artists like Streisand and Schwarzkopf
doing these expressive tricks, perhaps, because to his ear that they were
doing so not as an artificial add-on: either they were unaware of it -
innocence is OK - or they had done them so many times that it became part of
their natural style.

Gould, perhaps burdened by a heightened intellectual consciousness of such
matters, found that these sorts of expressive, romantic gestures, as he got
older, didn't work in his own playing.  He was no longer an innocent, as
perhaps he was on the earlier Bach recordings (which Bradley prefers).
Every now and then, in the later work, he does let go and a few of these
moments do still happen - but again, their unintentionality, if that's a
word, made them OK in his book.

In my own playing I don't take such a hard line against these expressive
tricks, but I do feel that performers that underline moments in these ways
must pick their moments to coincide with important points structurally in
the piece of music.  To do them gratuitously (e.g., because it sounds good
on a piano) is not OK.  There must be something in the piece compositionally
that backs up your idea.

I had actually saved Allan's original e-mail, as I didn't have time when it
was first posted to reply.  I remember feeling that I agreed with part of it
- but Gould is so maddeningly contradictory.  If he was trying to transcend,
why all the television watching with its concomitant intrusion of popular
culture?  Why all the interest in technology?  If he was opposed to "party
tricks" and rhetorical gestures, why the love of the late Romantics?  Their
music is full of theatrical gesture - to me, they took everything Gould
criticized in middle and late Beethoven to the nth degree.  Gould sometimes
strikes me as someone whose enormous intellect was on a constant crusade to
wipe out the emotional or Romantic side of his personality - a campaign in
which he was never successful.

Michael 


Allan MacLeod wrote:
>On the subject of Gould's spirituality and wrong-notes, I wonder if
>Gould wasn't at heart a Romantic?  He believed in a transcendental world
>of perfect forms and performances, in the way that Shelley did.  There
>was a beyond that spoke to us through music and his favourite composer
>was Gibbons who composed mostly sacred choral music.  Bach was one of
>those composers most in contact with that beyond, but occasionally he
>got it wrong, so that Gould would have to correct him to realize the
>perfection that Bach had sought to realized but missed.  This spiritual
>dimension may explain his interest in becoming a conductor.  We know he
>wanted to conduct the B-minor mass; perhaps he would have recorded some
>of the cantatas as well as music by Gibbons and some of Schoenberg's
>choral work.  We know that he wanted to record Verklaerte Nacht and
>Strauss' Metamorphosen.  All this suggests that he wanted to give
>expression to a transcendence that the piano was poorly suited to do.
>